The case for ropz as MVP at BLAST Rivals

ZywOo told HLTV after his MVP award that he felt he had ‘robbed’ ropz or flameZ of the MVP at BLAST Rivals in Fort Worth. ‘Robbed’ is obviously quite an emotive term here, but is there a real case for someone who isn’t ZywOo to have won the MVP?

We’d say yes - but it’s not as clean cut as that.

As this chart from our esteemed colleague suggests, ZywOo vs ropz is a fight split by a hair in terms of both impact and firepower. Essentially equivalent round swing and duel swing mean they are both winning fights the data says they ‘shouldn’t’ win as regularly as each other, and the fights they win and lose are impacting the game positively around the same amount too.

Now, there is a pretty blatant role disparity here, but essentially both are ‘selfish’ roles. The AWPer role is inherently quite selfish as you can’t go and die for someone (though you can be supportive with utility, this can be a waste of the most powerful gun in the game), and ropz’ style whilst self-sufficient is one that requires other fights to occur before he can truly take over the round.

However, those selfish roles are still extremely important, because somebody has to be the one who wins you the game, and for ropz to have this incredible impact despite being a space-user and not a space-creator To steal a football term, he’s more of a raumdeuter - he’s tasked with just finding space and using his intelligence to pick holes in the defence through timing and being difficult to get a hold of.

Being a good lurker is easy, but being an elite one is probably harder than being elite at any other role in the sense that it relies on an impossibly good understanding of the opposition’s movements, tendencies, timings and holes in their set-ups.

For that reason, we might argue that ropz being there is harder than ZywOo being there, though that is of course up for debate. One could easily say the same about AWPing, but AWPers find that ceiling far more often.

Even disregarding that, the difference between the two in playoffs is much starker than it was in the group stage.

You’d struggle to find a fight ropz didn’t win.

He was extraordinary in the playoffs, and ZywOo was sort of… quiet? It’s weird, but especially in the final it was noticeable how little he was really imposing himself, and ropz was fantastic in all three maps. ZywOo was the best player on map three, but marginally, while ropz carried a very close second map and had impact on the very close first, too. The data supports this, and you can see exactly how impactful ropz was and the fights he was winning, and it becomes difficult to find an argument against him being MVP.

But then, if ZywOo was so quiet in the playoffs, how is he so close to ropz overall? Well, the obvious answer is how good he was in the group stage, and it’s easy to discount that, but Vitality’s group stage was a little turbulent (at least by their standards), and they quite easily could have missed playoffs had he not been so dominant then.

ropz started slowly, and ZywOo finished slowly. Our personal opinion is that the latter is less impressive than the former, but you can argue without ZywOo ropz might have never had time to heat up.

We, personally, would have given the MVP to ropz.